Towards trapped-ion simulations of open quantum systems

Quantum systems have a finite degree of interaction with their environments. Therefore, understanding the dynamics of open quantum systems is of great importance for both real-life technological applications as well as for the fundamental understanding of the quantum many-body systems.

Here we present our progress in building a quantum simulator composed of a chain of Yb⁺ ions trapped in a uniquely designed experimental setup featuring a linear 3D Paul trap with high uniformity along the ion chain and high NA optical access from multiple directions to allow individual ion readout and addressing.

We intend to use this setup to study dissipative processes in both electronic (spin) and motional degrees of freedom.  The flexibility of our system will allow to introduce both local optical pumping and detection operations and individual sympathetic cooling. The former will be used to study the competition of unitary spin evolution of the system and non-unitary processes which leads to non-equilibrium phenomena such as dissipative ferromagnetic-paramagnetic phase transitions and measurement induced entanglement phase transitions. Ion-resolved cooling will be used to study the evolution of a spin system in contact with an engineered reservoir.